The ethics of milking

[Moonsinger]

By reading from various threads, I have a feeling that some of you aren't very fond of milking the game. Therefore, I'm hopping that you could share with me some of your reasons why you don't like milking the game or why you think that it's unethical to milk the game.

First of all, I think that all milkers should deserve a Nobel Prize for saving the environment. Imagining what the world would be like if we let the AIs' factories and coal plants running at full blast!

They also deserve a Nobel Prize for peace. World peace is usually achieved before 1800AD and it usually last to eternity (until the end of the game).

Of course, the Nobel Prize for lifetime achievement should also go to them too. Because they can't reach the stage of world-wide happiness, peace, and enlightenment without skillful conquest, diplomacy, micromanagement, and whatever.

Therefore, I don't see why milking is unethical or it's done by people who have no real skill to win the game through early conquest, space launch, or whatever. IMO, most milkers have the ability to win the game early too.

[Skyfish]

IMO, most milkers have the ability to win the game early too

...then they should just go ahead and do it !

Very important though :
- nobody questions the ability of Milkers. They are without doubt amazingly skilled players.

The main point is that "milking" the game means using 'exploits' or other actions that were not intended by the programmers or are not "in the spirit of the game". Your example of nuking your own land to get more food out of it, is a good example of just using every single trick in the game to achieve best score.

I prefer to play, and admire players who, like in many SG games play with Honorable rules as set forth in Realms Beyond :
http://www.realmsbeyond.net/civ/erules.html

[Creepster]

Milking a game is a lot of fun for some of us. Perhaps at times it is a bit tedious, but the fun for us is in completly controlling all aspects of a game.

Most milkers I would imagine have the game wrapped up by about 10 AD at the latest. I usually know if I can win the game or not by 1000 BC, the exception being Diety games. From here the biggest problem I have is not knowing how I want to win (conquest/diplo/etc) so I usualy go for the milked game. In order to properly m,ilk the game you need to be able to manage all styles of victories

Conquest to subdue the AI's
Domination: so you don't accidently trigger the win
Culture: so you don't accidently trigger the win
Space Ship: Technolgy to reduce pollution

I certainly don't think any of the things we do are unethical, including modifying the landmass for increased grazing. (which I have not done). The fun for some of us is to get as high a score as possible, or seeing how large you can grow a city, or several cities. Some milkers have planted forests all over the world that they do not control just for fun. It is a different aspect of the game that does appeal to a few individuals.

[MadScot]

I think I mentioned elsewhere that I don't like it, but if people want to do it fair enough. I am more impressed by the early finishjes than the high scores, personally.

It is to me as if a chess GM were to refuse to accept an opponent's resignation, playing on because there was an elegant mate 10 or 20 moves down the line, or because he wanted to queen all his pawns, or put all his pieces back on their start squares, or some such nonsense.

Just because the AI is too stupid to resign, there's no need to torture it. Well, OK maybe I can see the enjoyment there...

You've WON! Play another game already.

But like I said, if the micromanagement of hundreds of years of tedium appeals to people...

[Skyfish]

Maybe there should be a different competition for milkers...

[GI JOE]

I myself have more enjoyment of playing the game
to obtain certain goals.Not just how high a score
or fastest victory.There are too many loopholes
to take advantage of.Hopefully Civ 4 will deal
with that.There are times when a bit of milking
is needed but alot of players get way too carried away with it.I want to win in the honorable way.
The chess analogy above is a good example.

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by MadScot
It is to me as if a chess GM were to refuse to accept an opponent's resignation, playing on because there was an elegant mate 10 or 20 moves down the line, or because he wanted to queen all his pawns, or put all his pieces back on their start squares, or some such nonsense.

Very good example! Very good logic! However, from a different perspective, there is no honor (or fun) in destroying the dying opponent. Not only that we are merciful to let them live, but we also give them a nice piece of land to retire too.

[cracker]

I think that we need to recognize the Milked games in the same category as One City Challenge victories as extreme examples of what players can do in the games bypucshing the games to the limits.

I see this issue as really two things rolled into one. Currently the internal Civ3 scoring system is out of balance in that it penalizes early victory conditions relative to those games that are milked and exploited until 2050. There should be a balanced scoring system that rewards excellent games in both types of victory. This issue cause some people to disparage the Milked games because the milker has the advantage in the curren tsystem and can heavily distort the overall profile of the scores in any game.

The second part of the issue is that some players are disdainful of the level of detailed management and decision making that must be applied to a game to raise the score from 9000 pts in 1420ad up to 10,000 points by 270 turns later in the game. The tedious level of detailed play puts some peopl off while it only provides minimal recognition for some fairly brilliant and advanced uses of management skills that have to be applied for many hours on end.

In the near term future I think we will be implementing some things that provide better balance to both sides of the issue.

We will be fixing the scoring system for the games effective with Gotm17-Carthage(or equivalent) and we will be implementing some new methods of recognizing all the existing victory conditions as somewhat seperated from the Milked games. In the Milked games, I would like to begin recognizing the extreme exampels of performance as well as those games that set up conditions for triple/quadruple simultaneous victories.

OCC games are also severley penalized by the current scoring system and I think we need to look at some issues in that area also. (first we need to get some other issues out of the way).

Keep coming up with suggestions of positive things you would like to see in the games, but let us also try to recognize the value of some of these extreme preformance examples like milking and OCCs as they relate to providing players with opportunities to demonstrate supreme command of the game conditions

[col]

I've milked a game to see if I could to get a top ten finish. Believe me the ONLY way you can beat these people is if you are skilful enough to have the game won before they do. In effect the top players are still competing against the closk. As Creepster says you need to have the game won by early AD.

Try it if you think its easy. Its not just about tedious micromanagement, it involves a lot of skill. Not just in maximising your score but in the whole game. Look who is near the top of the QSC - all the milkers usually.

I was all set to milk GOTM15 to a high score defeat - but triggered domination accidentally. Typical.

[civ_steve]

'Ethics' within Civ3 depends on how much personality the player associates with the game entities. Moonsinger obviously personalizes her games considerably (which is fine). I suspect the average player is not too concerned with the level of pollution in the game (pristine wilderness or Borg paradise) as long as the end result is determined: Victory or Defeat!

Milking is absolutely NOT dishonorable!! It does require more time than I can dedicate to the game (if I submit, I'm usually rushing to complete in time!) so I've never milked; that is my gaming condition and I work with it and others do as they desire.

It is unfortunate that the scoring system and rankings table depend on the game score, which highly favors a milking game system. It is not sufficient to perform well and win to get a top score - you have to milk to achieve that score! I'm glad that Cracker and others are working on a scoring system that isn't biased towards a particular manner of gameplay. Good Luck!

[hotrod0823]

Milking - What's that???

I have never tried to or plan to milk a game, personal preference. I don't doubt that the top scores are excellent players and can use extreme MM and tedium for the last 100+ turns to see how high they can push it.

Aeson has address a lot of those issues in the balance of speed vs. CivIII score and tried to show that a player who wins early is just as qualified and skilled as a player that launches a ship in 2050.

I know many players have left the GOTM for other games, the Tournament or RBCiv because of the excessive focus on just Civ Score, the few people using exploits. But overall I think the community is moving in the right direction. It should not be about who wins but about what the game means to you. Does getting the fastest domination appeal to you, go for it, highest score, go for it, quickest launch, go for it!! Play as a OCC, a 5CC, try Always War, try honarable, try dasterdly. Above all play and enjoy and share!

The folks here, cracker, Aeson etc have been very focused on bringing the game back to what it should be a competion that focuses on theory, fosters good discussion and occasionally a moment where you go "hey why didn't I think of that" or wow that is cool, (ie Moonsingers fish) wouldn't do it but cool anyway!

Hotrod

[kojimanard]

Milking is clearly not unethical. It sounds boring to me, but so what. I'm curious how the diary farmers rake up the big points. It cant be from territory, or they would win a domination victory. Is it by having so many happy citizens or by piling up the future tech? If its future tech, can the game be edited to change the value of ft? If you could do that on the GOTM, then perhaps you wouldnt need a new scoring system.

[Bamspeedy]

True, the top several players that milk the game are also having the game 'won' awfully early. But there are some who milk the game who did not have the game 'won' early at all, but finish with a higher score than someone who finished much earlier.

In GOTM6 (warlord level), I finish in 6th place, but I didn't have the second continent conquered until hundreds of years later than people who finished below me. Sulla and Chiefpaco both were conquering and had finished the AI on the second continent way before I did, but they accidently triggered domination too early, so I outscored them just because I could milk longer. This example is why some really don't like milkers (well, maybe they don't like the scoring system/the milking process, not the milkers themselves).

Civ3's scoring system favors those that have patience and time to play until 2050 A.D. on most maps.

There are 2 ways to milk. One way is the detailed milking where you are still micromanaging for score up until the end (or very near end) of the game. The other way to milk the game is just by pressing the space bar and fly through the last couple hundred turns. The second method won't score as much as the first method, but it can still outscore a non-milker in most situations.

I think some people when they play the game and realize they won't get an early victory award, they feel they must/should milk the game so they'll finish higher up in the rankings. And this is one reason I never payed any attention to the 'Global Rankings'. The global rankings are mostly based on your scores (along with how many games you've played), so many players feel compelled to have to milk month after month to stay high up in the global rankings.

'Milking experts' should be guided to the Civfanatic's Hall of Fame to show off their milking skills.

[Bamspeedy]

kojimanard- Read SirPleb's article in the strategy articles forum titled "Maximizing your Score". That article will give you details about the scoring system and how best to exploit it.

Future tech is worthless.

Your score is figured by the average score per turn. So the longer you can control maximum territory and have maximum population points/happiness, this will increase your average. The longer you play when you 'own' the whole world helps increase your average because of the turns (at the start of the game) where you had a low score because of low territory/population.

[kojimanard]

Thanks Bamspeedy,

Your explanation was very clear, and I will also read the article.

[Yndy]

I will add my comments as I used to be against milking but GOTM 15 will be my first historigraphic victory.

I agree with all the opinions that milking is tedious. But I also agree that careful milking is an art and I’m quite curious to see how well I did in my attempt as compared to the veteran farmers. Why did I find milking to be an art?

The higher your early score is, the higher your final score is (meaning that you have to balance your early play to achieve high scores)
The earlier you reach the domination limit the higher your score will be.
The better you arrange your cities within the territory available and in the same time avoid the domination limit the higher your score will be.
The faster you research the necessary sciences, the faster your population will grow and the lower the pollution will be. This translates into higher score.
The happier you manage to keep your citizens, the higher your score will be.

I found it very tough to handle all of the above apart from being time-consuming.
I would like to break a myth that I have seen in many threads including this one. Milking is not tedious in the last 100+ turns of the game. I expected it to be so but it turned out that it was tedious the first 30 turns after I reached the domination limit. Later it was very tedious for the following 35 turns more than I would have thought. Later it is about pressing Enter until the end of the game with the occasional review of the cities.

The benefits given the current score system are not very important in my opinion. I used to score in the lower ten of the top 30 when I played my first GOTMs. My failed milking attempt in GOTM 12 (20 turns of milking and accidental domination) gave me the 15th position. I expect a top 10 rank in GOTM 15. Frankly I don’t care if I’m top 10 or top 25 and I believe that not more than 5 people outrank me by milking the game just as I guess I only outrank 5 people with my milking attempt.

I believe that people that just delay victory and press Enter without micromanaging are truly taking advantage of the score system. AFAIK the new scoring formula will take that into consideration and poor milking attempts will have their final score lowered compared to the score they would get without milking. This would mean that good milking attempts would still score higher that average early victories.

[Sirian]

I view "milking" as a negative side effect of an otherwise positive ambition. The highest level of competition in any game is "no holds barred". If the game allows it, you use it. The most talented and ambitious players come together, bringing their all, and they feed off one another, learning from and improving on one another's innovations, either openly (sharing the knowledge, competing on execution) or "cut throat" (sharing nothing of any of their "trade secrets", which others must pick up through experience and direct observation). No Holds Barred in any game is not for everybody, but it is where the highest levels of excellence will congregate.

The problem arises when the game itself is poorly designed, insufficiently refined. Players then have a choice of either "live with it the way it is", which for a broken game results in all sorts of otherwise senseless contortions, or "remake the game to correct the problems".

Classic games like Chess, Go, Bridge, and Backgammon, surely went through revisions to their rules up until a point at which the rule set defined a game where skill prevailed, and where the display of skill was easily understood, measured, and appreciated.

Civ3 has some loopholes in its game play. There are certain options that have been so much more dominant than others, that they were must-use if you wanted to compete No Holds Barred. That is a problem for a game's longevity. Imagine if the rules for Chess were such that a certain opening for White was so dominant, that there was nothing else to play if you wanted to win. You move this pawn, this piece, that pawn, that piece, and bang, you're guaranteed a win. That would be broken. That would change Chess into Tic-Tac-Toe. Chess only endures because its game balance provides for many variations on the strategy, with the possibility for truly clever players to innovate previously unknown moves.

Civ3 also has an inadequate scoring system. It measures a couple of things, but ignores everything else. Thus, it only really measures a portion of the performance, and it forces gameplay down specific avenues, the same "opening" over and over and over, followed by the same almost-entirely predictable series of moves. That appeals to some players, but not to me.

I'm more the type that demands more from my gaming. I see milking as "settling" for a broken game, playing it as-is, even when the gameplay involved becomes a shadow of what the game intended to offer. If the "game" is competing vs the AI civs, the milkers have beaten that game at some point and shift into a whole other type of game. That other type of game is not enough to hold my interest. It's not unethical, but it is twisted, or rather, allowing your own gameplay to be twisted by a broken set of rules. In a sense, I see it as letting yourself be led around by a bad set of rules. There is much excellence involved, but it is all focused on the few aspects of the game that are measured by the scoring system: territory and happy populations.

The fact that milkers MUST USE a bean counter (Mapstat) to aid their gameplay also rubs me wrong. This reinforces the fact that what we have here is a single game plan being reenacted over and over, the same "Chess Opening" being replayed.

Anybody ever "paint by numbers"? There is a certain satisfaction to it, and even to doing it over and over on different portraits. However, if you have any talent at all for painting, you don't need the outline and won't enjoy somebody else essentially doing the painting for you, with you just standing there trying to copy their work. There's just no satisfaction to seeing who can be the most perfect at not painting outside any of the lines. Sure, a contest can be made to see who can paint inside those lines the most accurately, and it can measure a great deal of skill if pushed far enough, but that does nothing at all to measure painting skill. It becomes something else.

Milking is not Civ III. It is something else. The broken Civ3 scoring system is like the outline of the Paint by Numbers. If you limit yourself to that, the painting is going to be tedious work, instead of art. Mechanical, not creative. The creativity is what is missing from the milking. It is a demanding management process that takes a wide variety of expertise, but to what end?

The scoring system OUGHT to measure more than it does. I hope Aeson can forge a better one, I'm sure he will improve on any number of things. I have my doubts that he, or anybody, can fully rebalance the game, though. Too much turns on luck factors. If you pop a goody hut and get a settler, or you get hostiles, that makes a huge difference, and that's just of dozens of examples where a whole game can and often does turn on one roll of the RNG. Then there are FATAL loopholes in the game balance such as unit upgrades. How long has it been since a "winning" result in the top five submitted scores to GOTM did not do either a massive warrior-to-sword upgrade or chariot-to-horse or horse-to-knight? How would GOTM players do on a Deity map if unit upgrades were off the table completely? Or if they cost double what they do now (the same as cash-buying units)? When Firaxis took away the endless whipping, Aeson was adding workers to size 1 cities within days, and getting around it. There are a lot of variables to this game, too many for any scoring system to measure them all accurately. I'm afraid it's a lost cause.

In that sense, I don't mind milking at all. Faced with a broken game, there are only two choices: roll with it, or redesign it. The part of Civ3 I most enjoy is the opening, followed by the expansion phase. That's the most creative stage, especially if there are more than one game plans in your strategic arsenal. The last thing I want to do is sit around for any length of time in the end game, faced only by the challenge of how to stay awake through clicking next turn a hundred times.

I was struck by Dave's comment about GOTM14, where he said that the only winning strategy was to gather a large force of upgradable units and a big cash stockpile, upgrade and invade. I didn't do that at all. Nobody challenged that remark, though. The conventional wisdom among GOTM players has been chiseled down to a finely crafted pre-ordained set of moves, evolved over more than a dozen milking campaigns. And that is what I see as the unfortunate side of milking: all else must be bent to the game's broken scoring system. Other game plans might be doable, might be possible, might even be more challenging or more fun, but they aren't even on the radar screen, because the only game plans of interest are ones that maximize the bits of the game measured by the scoring system, especially territory. And it is precisely because the game is BROKEN that there is one single dominant strategy to succeeding at scoring well. Over time, that strat went from "following" AI settler pairs and stealing their newly settled underdefended cities (and quickly earning their way to all kinds of diplomatic concessions), to giving away cities and immediately reconquering them (still on the diplomatic concessions, which is another imbalanced area of this game), to poprushing an endless army, now finally down to the mass upgrade of cheap units. In every case, though, it has been a strategy in which the player takes some kind of shortcut to propel them past the AI in productivity of ancient units. The milking phase is just the part where folks sit around and gloat over their complete dominance of the AI. The early game strategy evolves with the changing game rules, as Firaxis has plugged many of the leaks in their design, but the milking phase remains the same across all the patches: players who've long since beaten the game playing a second game of Paint By Numbers.


No Holds Barred competition is a wondrous thing. There is a feeling of adrenalin, of pushing yourself to your limits vs elite opponents. This offers a great rush. I enjoyed this feeling for years with an extremely well-crafted and well-balanced game: Descent. And yet even there, the original game design had its flaws. There was one super-weapon, which allowed for fire-and-forget self-guided one-shot kills. Comparatively, this was a low skill weapon. Anybody could get lucky with it. It had its own skill set, but it was not the same skill sets and gameplay as the rest of the game. The competitive community eventually split between those who played nothing but levels packed with these things, and those who played nothing but levels absent these things. Neither set of players could compete in the other set's levels. However, those using the big missile had one flavor of gameplay, one "Chess Opening". They had a one-dimensional experience. The rest of us had a richer, broader, deeper gaming competition which evolved to world class skill levels. I liked to be a complete player and venture into the big missile levels sometimes, to be able to compete well there, but I'd stop in for a game or two on occasion (I enjoyed all the flavors of that game, including the big missiles; I just needed more than that one flavor) then head back home to the real competition.

Civ3 isn't quite like that. There is no cut-and-dried separation on the gameplay. However, I do find the "milking" akin to the big missiles in Descent: one dimensional. There's precisely one way to succeed at it: reach domination threshold the fastest, combined with expert management until 2050. And the fastest way to domination is always the early military rush, aided by the whip and the cash upgrade.

The sameness factor arises out of the goals and the scoring. I'm afraid it would be little different with a "fastest finish" as the only goal. There are certain "best" moves in the imbalanced Civ3 list of options for speeding along to each of the victory conditions. The only answer I have found for this is to vary the goals, and even the rules. That doesn't allow for global rankings, doesn't permit measuring the same things game after game, but which do you personally value more: global rankings? Or balanced (varied) gameplay?

Those who milk, yet don't understand why others don't value their results highly, are missing the point, I think. It's not about "unethical", it's about "unimaginative". Some of us are more interested in enjoying the experience than we are in being recognized for performance. The only reason to milk is the pursuit of global ranking: the competition. Those who disapprove of milking are not jealous. We're dumbfounded. We simply don't understand why people are attracted to competing in this way. The competition itself has overshadowed the game. Instead of seeking to make the game harder, to make it a worthy endeavor, you settle for leaving in almost all the exploits and competing over who destroys the broken game by the largest margin in any given month.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. It's like a bunch of adults competing in little league vs ten-year-olds. The competition isn't even against the other team (the AI's), but to see who hits the longest home-run ball. That's cool and all, but it's NOT baseball. Mapstat is like a net raised in the outfield to prevent home runs from being hit after a certain point, because if the score is run up TOO HIGH, the umps will call the game on the Mercy Rule and just end it. We can't have that, now can we?

Unethical? No. Unsporting? Not really. The AI's don't care. Nothing wrong with a home run derby. Gives fans a chance to ooh and ah at all those long balls sailing over the fence. Of course, it's a whole different thing to hit a pitch thrown by a ten year old vs trying to hit one thrown by a professional. I see the milkers as those content to stay in there and snore through a game against ten-year-olds so they can point up to the scoreboard at how many runs they batted in. Make no mistake, NOBODY is confusing that kind of scoring with real Civ3 excellence. All the milkers end up having to report the few runs they scored vs adult pitchers (the part of the game up until they have the AI's by the throat) as the "real" score anyway. So if you have to go back and highlight your "true achievements", and that is the part everybody recognizes as your display of skill, what then is the point to doing all the milking?

The emperor has no clothes.


- Sirian

[col]

I guess that's the most articulate and eloquent argument I've read on the subject. I certainly dont disagree with either the overall sentiment or most of the detail expressed here.

But I do think Sirian is overstating a little when he compares milkers to adults competing in little league.

[Aggie]

Although I don't consider milking to be an exploit, I think Sirian is right when he states that it's a shame that it is THE way to get the highest scores.

But I just don't see how it's a bad thing to mass upgrade or to pop rush endless armies.

[Kemal]

I don't think there's anything unethical or wrong about milking, currently it is just the name given to the way to get the highest score in this game.

If you have the skills you can score more points this way than the in-game score bonus for finishing early can ever give you. So everyone who wants to have a shot at the top positions needs to milk, because score is currently the only criterium on which the medal awards distribution is based. I believe that is why the gotm knows other awards for fast finishes, so both play styles have something to play for.

I would personally prefer, under the current scoring system, to abandon the silver and bronze medal and just make an "highest score award" (call it a gold medal or something else) for the person that has scored highest for the game, because the 2nd and 3rd position are almost always games of the same type as the number one game but with a lower score.

Hopefully these discussions about whether milking is unethical etcetera will be done away with when Aeson and cracker present their new score formula for the GotM.